


you're bound to stay (you've lost your way)

by apatternedfever



Category: The Cabin in the Woods (2011)
Genre: Backstory, Canon Typical Violence, Gen, PTSD, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-22
Updated: 2013-12-22
Packaged: 2018-01-05 12:54:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,609
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1094102
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apatternedfever/pseuds/apatternedfever
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Joanne runs, and survives. That's where it starts, directly upstairs from where it will end.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you're bound to stay (you've lost your way)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [raedbard](https://archiveofourown.org/users/raedbard/gifts).



Annie and Mark and Paul and Robby are nineteen, and Joanne is twenty, their mother hen just enough older to tease her for it. Paul's birthday is coming up next month, but that won't detour the teasing. They'll always tease her, about those four months between her birthday and Paul's, about her studiousness, about her turning down every date she's every been asked on. Sometimes it's silly and sometimes it's worried and sometimes it's just a little too harsh, but she never minds, really. They've been friends too long for that.

Her fake ID is the best, so she buys them beer on the trip up to the cabin (Mark's cousin's cabin, I did so tell you about him before, you just never listen, dumbass). Then she stretches out in the backseat of the minivan and closes her eyes and lets the conversation and the music swirl around her, tries to do like Annie told her to and forget the class she failed last semester, forget the semester starting in two weeks, forget all the little stresses that build up day-to-day and enjoy the trip ahead.

*

Annie is lying on the couch when the cellar door opens, her head in Paul's lap, and she jumps hard enough that she falls onto the floor. Everyone is startled, and her yelp just makes them jump again, draws their eyes down to her.

Then Robby starts laughing, that loud, infectious cackle of his, and then they're all laughing, and it's not so scary anymore. So the door slammed up, so what? It was probably a breeze, Mark says, and that's good enough for them.

"I wonder what's down there?" Joanne asks, leaning over the arm of the chair to get a slightly better look. She's the closest, but it's too dark. There's no way to tell, from here.

"Let's find out," Paul says.

(She will look back on the this one day, in that brief period where looking back doesn't send her noisily crazy and isn't something she forbids herself. She'll look back and wish she could take the question back, wonder what would have happened if they never went down, but she knows it's too late for what if, too late to wonder.

Mostly she'll look back and think: _this is where it started_.)

*

Robby refuses to take off the straw hat and plaid shirt, even as they climb the stairs again. It's the one amusing thing to come out of the creepy trip into the cellar, the one thing in the multitudes hidden down there that didn't feel somehow dangerous to play with, and Robby, as always, found the opportunity to break the mood and charged head-long into it.

He refuses to take it off as they flop around, joking and drinking. As Annie and Paul disappear to fuck in the woods and they pretend they don't know that's where they're going. When they hear Paul screaming at the door to be let in, and they listen to his garbled, panicked ranting about weird guys in the woods and Annie being taken and not knowing what happened and Joanne stares at the blood on his hands. Stares and stares, as Mark goes outside to prove there's nothing out there. Stares until Mark starts screaming.

There's no sign of anyone else by the time they find him. Joanne's never seen a dead body before. The blood is everywhere, and it's hard to stop staring, even to run.

(They call it trauma, when it all blurs after this. They call it PTSD and unfortunate, but not unsurprising. They call it a lot of things, just like they call her a lot of things, after that night.

Joanne dreams about Mark's body, hacked at until she can see his organs, blood on the trees. She dreams about Robby still coughing up blood and crying when they found him, and Paul's face when he covers the mess of wounds that barely look like a mouth and a nose under the blood to put Robby out of his misery. Paul telling her to run and not look back. She didn't see him die, she didn't see Annie die, but she dreams about what it might have looked like anyway. The edges aren't sharp and the details blend together and she knows she's lost hours from the long night.

Joanne calls it fucking unfair that she has to remember any of it at all.)

*

Joanne gets home when dawn is breaking across the sky, climbing out of the passenger's seat of a stranger's car with a mumbled thanks. Her parents' cars aren't in the driveway, so she digs the spare key out of the flowerpot and lets herself in. She types in the alarm code. The dog barks down the hall, the sound of its paws skittering across the wood floor.

Everything is normal, except for the blood and straw she tracks through the hallway. She pulls open the fridge (leaving one large, smeared, bloody handprint on the front of her mother's nice white fridge) and pulls out the first thing she sees. She doesn't bother with a glass. The orange juice stings against the cuts on her lips, but the gnawing hunger in her stomach recedes a little.

September 9th is neatly crossed out on the calendar hanging on the wall, the way her mother does every morning before leaving for work.

(They left _yesterday_.)

She throws the jug at the wall. She starts screaming. The dog runs off whining, the fridge hangs open behind her, the juice drips down and blends into the yellow walls, and Joanne keeps screaming. Her father gets home from her work, then her mother, and her voice is hoarse but she doesn't stop screaming. She presses herself back tighter into the little corner she's managed to find, arms wrapped tight around her legs, dried blood against dried blood, and she keeps screaming.

She doesn't stop for days.

* 

They decide she didn't kill her missing friends, that she was the unfortunate victim of costumed serial killers. When she swears it's not a costume at all, that what should have been a mask came off in her hands and underneath there was nothing, they say it's part of the trauma. They say the stress made her imagine things.

They decide she's crazy, traumatized, that she needs sympathy and help. She tells them she just wants to be left alone and they don't listen. They tell her how she's supposed to be healing instead.

*

It's not really her therapist's advice, but Joanne tells anyone who asks that it was. It's not exactly not, either. They'd talked about her going back to the scene before, that maybe it would help her finally put it behind her, but her therapist had been adamant that she wasn't ready.

Joanne wants it to be over, though. She wants around being a victim, being the survivor. She's twenty-six, and people still treat her like she's frozen at nineteen, like the seven years since have meant nothing. Like none of the wounds could have scabbed over at all.

(They haven't healed, but they're not gaping open anymore, either.)

So she goes back. Maybe it will help. It's the anniversary, anyway. Seven might not be a traditional big one, but she didn't go back for the first, or the fifth. She owes it to them to visit the place where they died. She wonders if the blood is still there, somewhere, in the grooves of the tree. She expects it to be deserted. They never caught the killers, after all.

What she finds when she pulls up (later than she'd anticipated, past dark and she's not going to turn around, not when she's already here) is a minivan in the driveway and the sound of music inside the house. What she sees, through the windows, is too familiar. Five faces, too young, laughing in that nervous way you do when you really need a laugh to break the tension, pouring out of the cellar, someone's holding a necklace in their hands and it's not a hat but it's too close, in every way, so close that it brings her back seven years --

She goes in screaming.

*

She doesn't remember getting knocked out. She remembers shouting at the group in the cabin, too young, too blind, no idea the chances that they won't survive the night. She remembers telling them to run, run now, to go before it's too late. She remembers getting laughed at, strong-armed out, hovering around and waiting for somebody to peek out to try and reason with them again --

And now Joanne doesn't know where she is. It's not a hospital again. It's not a jail cell, whatever the kids in the cabin had threatened. It's just a room, very white and bare and unremarkable.

(This, she tells herself later, is when she started to heal. Knowing what happened is all she needs for the closure she never thought she'd get.

And then she'll down a drink and clean her gun and sign another paper that brings them a step closer to this year's sacrifice.)

*

She works her way up through the ranks remarkably quickly, from intern to director in just over four years. She does it because she's good, because she knows what she's doing, because she comes in with more knowledge and more steel than most of the interns. She gets the last promotion because she's lucky, because the current Director decides he's had enough of sending quintets to their death after this year, and happens to think she'd be pretty good at it.

There are rumors, of course, because this is an office like any other, despite what it is they do. Because rumors are a way to pass the time. They say she slept her way to the top, that she sold her soul to the Ancients, that she pledged them something, that she's their child, that she sold herself to someone else. 

(For one day, the rumor floats around those who have been around long enough, that she discovered the set-up during her year as a sacrifice, that this was what they promised her to get her to keep quiet and the rest of it was a set-up. One day, one tiny snatch of it, but somebody squashes it almost immediately.)

She lets them gossip, lets the rumors circulate unchecked. Nobody's brave enough to ask her if any of them are true.

* 

The two weeks after the ritual are reserved for all facilities to take a break. The employees perform best this way, they've found. Two weeks to let everything sink in, to enjoy the world they fought and lied to save, to remember what they're working for.

Then it's back to planning for the sacrifice ahead.

She doesn't always take the two full weeks. Never, really. She doesn't need them. She knows exactly what she's working for.

(When there's bodies -- there isn't always enough left to consider them bodies -- she goes to view them, before they're found or taken away. She's lost track of how many bodies she's seen but they still haven't banished the sight of the first one. She's not sentimental enough to believe they will anymore.

She doesn't like corpses, but she looks anyway.

Killing she doesn't feel much for one way or another, anymore.)

*

Face to face meetings, she learns early on, are rare. They need the budget to go to the ritual, after all. Flying them all to the same place is not a priority. But that doesn't mean the Directors don't communicate. They call, they video conference, and almost every day, they email. More than a week without at least a check in from each of the other Directors is rare, and usually only happens in the break following a ritual.

"Mrs. Director, ma'am?"

There's an element of charade to the humble note in Hadley's voice. There always is. The man is a constant joker and more or less an idiot, but he's an idiot who does his job and does it well, so it's not her place to step in. He respects her, even if he doesn't know how to properly show it. Even if it's probably fear as much as anything else.

"What is it?" She doesn't look up from her laptop. Hadley doesn't require that much concentration. Russia is more important; the Director can handle his employees just fine, but the feedback can't hurt. Venting, really, even if it will go on reports as collaboration and brainstorming. Russia's Director deserves the venting. Of all the reasons to try and mess with the system, getting bored is one of the stupidest she's ever heard. She wishes she could say it was the first time she'd heard it. Maybe all the controllers were idiots. But then, Russia's Director would have to be one too to have considered it for so much as a second, and he seems to have done that much.

(She doesn't know his name; he doesn't know hers; the system works just fine for her. Her employees don't know it either. Her predecessor was the same. The distance helps.)

"The sacrifices, ma'am. The final selection."

"Leave the files," she instructs, even as her fingers take to the keys. _Fire them. They obviously don't understand how important their jobs are. Even if you refuse to let them do it, that will cause problems._

She doesn't push the laptop back until she hears her office door shut with a soft snick, taking the files. Everything was in order when they narrowed down the candidates; there's no reasons anything should have changed. Still, she pages through the files. Final checks never hurt anyone. Not taking the time for them has.

Her inbox chimes as she's halfway through the prospective Scholar's file. She leans across her desk to check it. _I'm giving them one more chance, and then I'm demoting them. I'd rather not fire them yet. They're not that bad._

She doesn't bother responding. Obviously, he's not going to take her advice. If he doesn't have the stomach to fire employees that might cause trouble, he won't last.

She's never hesitated to fire anyone who gives her reason to. It's imperative that the ritual go off without a hitch. If she has to sacrifice the life of some idiot who couldn't play their part correctly, that's all part of the price they pay every year, as much a part of her job as the time she spends rereading the files again and again.

Her concentration isn't broken that badly by the short email, but she goes back to the beginning anyway. It can never hurt to read again. _Holden_ , she reads, turning the name around in her head. It's a good name for the Scholar. They're all primed for a good show this year, even if they'll have to do a little more than she'd hoped to get them there. Hopefully their work will pay off. Obviously they can't count on Russia to pick up the slack this year, and one facility down before it even begins is no good for anyone.

*

Patience Buckner puts an axe in the back of her head and in a way, it's anticlimactic. It would be more interesting viewing, she thinks in the split-second she has for it, if it was the scarecrows. A better narrative. She's spent too many years crafting rituals, crafting shows, to not acknowledge that disappointment. The Buckners were just another monster in her stable. The scarecrows would have meant something.

The blood is everywhere. The Director goes down, knowing that, despite her sacrifices and her best efforts, the world isn't far behind.


End file.
